To see one downbeat musical might be considered a misfortune; but to see two in a row starts to look like carelessness. On Sunday night I saw an Encores! production of Juno, Marc Blitzstein’s 1959 musical adaptation of O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, which revolves around a mother, in mourning for her murdered son, and her relationship with her surviving daughter; and last night I saw an early preview for a new musical, A Catered Affair, based on the 1956 film, which also revolves around a mother, in mourning for her dead soldier son, and her relationship with her surviving daughter.
See enough shows, of course, and parallels start inadvertently suggesting themselves everywhere: in his New York Times review of Juno, Ben Brantley compared its matriarch figure with that of the one in Gypsy (which opened originally in the same year, and - by weird coincidence - saw the current Broadway revival also open last Thursday, the same night that Juno returned to New York). Writing of the openings of both in 1959, Brantley notes of the commercial fate of its lead characters, “Broadway is a cannibal god, and only one of them was destined to live for more than a few weeks that year. The winner went on to become a household bitch-goddess for countless aficionados of musicals and a byword for maternal ambition; the other slunk off into the shadows of the forgotten.”
But if, for the weekend past only, both were briefly back, he went on to say, “You’ll have the chance to see Gypsy for many months, if not years, to come. When Juno closes on Sunday, it will probably just crawl back into the archives.” That, of course, is the place that Encores! is designed to search out shows from: it is a bit like Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musicals shows but with a bigger budget — and a full orchestra instead of solo piano — from whom the idea was in fact “borrowed” (and which coincidentally also returned last Sunday for its latest London season with a production of the forgotten 1946 Arthur Schwarz-scored musical Park Avenue). But Encores!, perhaps most famous for reinventing Chicago and making it into an even bigger hit this time around in its pared-back revival that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary in the West End, proves its credentials by looking into more rare crevices of the repertoire.
As Brantley puts it, ” Theatergoers who are truly passionate about the history and development of the musical will want to take advantage of the fleeting return of Juno to New York. Those looking for a high-spirited evening of escapism should look elsewhere. Joseph Stein and Marc Blitzstein’s unlikely adaptation of Juno and the Paycock, Sean Casey’s great tragicomedy about a family in the tenements of civil-war-torn Dublin in the 1920s, is never going to be a crowd pleaser. This after all, is a show that begins with the gunning down of a young Irishman by English soldiers, while his neighbors look on in horror. And Blitzstein’s complex score, which has its admirers among musical cognoscenti, exudes a downward-pulling momentum.”
I fear that Mr Brantley could simply change the show title and a plot detail or two and have written his review for A Catered Affair already. But it’s also brave and surprising to find that Broadway can still produce this sort of show; it proves that Broadway has not yet sold its soul entirely to the gods of spectacle. (And it’s also exciting to see a John Doyle production in which the actors don’t play their own instruments).
Of course, the reviews aren’t in yet — those aren’t being published till the show opens on April 17 — nor have the critics been in yet. So this isn’t a review, either — but I will merely note that if the Broadway musical has lately started to seem a homogenous pursuit of creating bubblegum adaptations of bubblegum movies, however still-chewy or chewed out they are (bring it on, Legally Blonde, Hairspray, Cry-Baby and Xanadu), both Juno and A Catered Affair hark back to another era: when musicals dared to establish mood, not just mayhem. These aren’t loud shows, or lavish ones; but they seek to insinuate themselves far more stealthily into a place that is even more important - their audience’s hearts and minds. And as the mother in each, the sublime Victoria Clark (who in Juno looks like she could be Eve Best’s mum!) and Faith Prince (gently throwing off the comedienne’s mantle that she normally adopts for something far more subtler) both take the audience on a journey into their own hearts and minds to do so.
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